April 2013 – Page 90

Sexy Sneezing, Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear of the 2008 paper on “sneezing induced by sexual ideation.” I have “suffered” with this problem my whole life and have made futile web searches to understand this issue. (I use quotations around “suffered” because it isn’t that big of a deal.) For as long as I can remember, sex and sexual arousal – literally just thoughts of sex – have made me sneeze and get a runny nose. If I am very mentally aroused, I might sneeze 6-8 times and my nose just gets flooded, so this doesn’t have to be associated with any physical contact whatsoever.

It’s not a big deal in that I have been married for over 20 years and have a rich and rewarding sex life. When we were first dating, my wife thought I was allergic to her – quite the opposite, I can assure you dear! Nevertheless, it’s not exactly convenient to get a runny nose during intercourse. When you fancy yourself a smooth player, it kind of kills the fantasy each time you have to stop and blow your nose (“oooh, does that feel good, yeah, yeah – oh, just a sec – [grabs tissue] HOOORRNK!”).

However, after all these years, I think it bothers me more than it does my wife – i.e., I will forever be super self-conscious of this odd affliction where she is just fine with me as I am (or at least does a good job of not making me feel weird about something that cannot be helped). So the thing that sucks the most about sneezing associated with arousal is that it makes it almost impossible to hide what you are thinking.

Thankfully I have entered my mid-40s and occasionally think about something other than sex (occasionally). Because of this privacy issue I have obviously not shared this with other people even though I am generally a very open person and not even remotely prudish. I ask, would you want your kids, parents, or friends thinking you were being a horn dog every time you sneezed! “Whew, lot of pollen in the air today.” Of course I sneeze infrequently for all kinds of reasons unrelated to sexual arousal and the last thing I want is everyone in the room wondering why I am being such a pervert over an innocent sneeze while I watch The Antiques Roadshow. It’s bad enough that every time I sneeze I get that “boy, I know what you are thinking” look from my wife.

Ultimately, I guess I should just be pleased to report that, after 20 plus years of marriage, my wife can still make me sneeze like nobody else!

From The Archive: The First Face Of The Day

by Chris Bodenner

Andrew published it on February 13, 2007:

With this photo, I’m going to try to introduce a new feature, made possible by the Atlantic’s Getty Images subscription. I hope to take the time each day to review as many of the news photographs in the past 24 hours and find a simple face to express something somewhere that is going on in the world. This is a depressing start, but I hope to include the full variety of human experience captured by Getty’s superb photographers. The criteria are simply a face and the past day.

The caption:

An Iraqi man injured in a car bomb explosion lies on a hospital bed February 12, 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq. On the anniversary of the attack on the Al-Askariya Mosque, five explosions went off in Baghdad including at least two car bombs at the Shorja market killing at least 80 people and wounding approximately 190. By Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images.

That Broken Leg, Ctd

by Doug Allen

A reader who teaches student-athletes disagrees with Jon Green on the athlete work ethic:

I teach classes at a MAJOR sports university and have students who are going into the NFL draft. Every one of my student athletes is among my most conscientious, polite, and hardworking students. In fact, if I took my student-athletes of any sport and put them up against the regular student body, I would choose to teach the athletes every day of the week. Sure, they have a support system that keeps them in school, makes them go to class, and offers tutoring, but, um, good? I have problems with the exploitation of student athletes, but I have never had any problems with their in-class conduct. In fact, quite the opposite. I think that a few bad student-athletes get the press and tarnishes all of their reputation, but do you really believe that athletes who are monitored constantly are worse people and/or students than your average frat house? In my experience, the athletes are WAY better.

Another reader lists some of the support she received as a student-athlete:

Every medical expense I ever needed during college, for any reason, was covered by the athletic department. This included birth control, routine eye appointments, contact lenses. For those who had any major injury, surgery was completely paid for. To help with rehab, there were daily visits with personal trainers who tailored programs to your specific injury.

When I became depressed my senior year, the athletic director immediately sent me to a therapist. I’ll never forget the day she told me, “we will pay for every visit you need, and we will do everything we can to get you better.” They even paid for anti-depressants, and this continued even after my eligibility was up. Did I mention I was a non-revenue-producing women’s soccer player, it was not a sports-related injury, and the grand total of my care over four years must have cost unimaginable sums of money?

While this is by no means every athlete’s experience, I’m guessing most large (football) schools provide their students with similarly extensive care, especially to high-profile athletes in revenue sports. And for those of you getting ready to pick a college, you might want to consider not only where you want to get your degree if you’re severely injured and can’t play again, but also where you’re able to get the best resources to get you better again.

Another distinguishes between the big-money sports and others:

Both football and basketball have high-paying professional leagues that apply exclusionary age rules to their labor pool and rely heavily on college sports for player development. So an NBA-caliber college freshman – or an NFL-caliber freshman or sophomore – isn’t being treated to a free education enriched by some athletic competition; he’s being screwed out of a chance to get paid in the draft before risking injury in an NCAA season.

Not every NCAA athlete is getting screwed. Hell, not every football or basketball player is getting screwed. It’s great that you enjoyed playing sports in college, and it’s great that lots of other people also have their experience enriched by playing on a team. But please, please don’t be so dense as to let that obscure the fact that there are hundreds of kids who play so well at popular sports that their labor would be worth hundreds of thousands or millions on an open market, who are playing college sports for free because there is no open market to sell it on. That’s the trick the NCAA wants to pull, and it isn’t helpful to be credulously repeating it.

It seems to me that this reader has more of a problem with the draft eligibility rules that prevent these athletes from going straight from high school to the pros than with the funding of college athletes. As to the point that “there is no open market to sell it on,” that’s simply untrue for basketball. Current Milwaukee Bucks star Brandon Jennings opted [NYT] to play professional basketball in Italy out of high school rather than attending the University of Arizona, and the NBA Development League (pdf) allows all players over 18.

Another reader questions the relevance of my own experience:

With all due respect to your Ultimate Frisbee career (just a guess, but amirite?), you’re conflating two very different things. No one is suggesting that schools do away with sports that don’t make money, or paying athletes that compete in those sports. We are talking about allowing some of the money generated by a huge enterprise to go to those who make it possible. No one wants to take your experience on a club team away from you, but neither is anyone demanding that you should have been paid for it. This is about relatively simple economics, and I’m not sure that your point has any relevance to the actual discussion.

This reader is right, I played Ultimate in college. But I was not trying to argue that I should have been paid for my experience (I definitely should not have), I was simply pointing out that the opportunity to play a sport at the college level could be considered a reward in and of itself, and that is something to take into account when discussing whether or not student-athletes are being “exploited.” I was willing to pay out-of-pocket for this chance, and this is why you see students trying to walk on to teams even if there isn’t a scholarship available for them: because playing on a team at a competitive level can be fun and rewarding.

I’m not so sure that this is a case of “relatively simple economics,” either. Most of the discussion of student-athletes assume that the benefits flow only one way: scholarship athletes in big-money sports get nothing (except for scholarships, medical care, tutoring, the opportunity to showcase their skills…) while the schools reap all of the rewards. But I think the relationship is more symbiotic than that. College sports teams get the benefits of a built-in fan base. Across all 338 teams in NCAA Division 1 basketball, attendance at each home game averaged over 5,000 fans during 2012 (with schools like Louisville as high as 21,000 per game), while the 16 teams in the NBA’s D-League averaged about 2,800 fans per game in the 2010-2011 season despite an arguably higher level of play. Fans flock to see their favorite programs play, not necessarily the star players.

As I said before, I would like to see more long-term thinking from colleges to help ensure that sports-related injuries like Ware’s don’t force the athlete to leave school for financial reasons. But paying athletes? I’m just not there yet.

Haunted By Wagner

by Brendan James

Nicholas Spice, unnerved by the power that Wagner’s music has always held over listeners, asks if the German composer is “bad for us”:

In the early days, the expressionistic intensity of Tristan und Isolde produced violent reactions in its audiences. The young Belgian composer Guillaume Lekeu fainted and had to be carried out of the theatre (he was to die of typhoid from eating a contaminated sorbet a day after his 24th birthday); Chabrier and Ravel both burst into tears while listening to the Prelude. But Berlioz, while reviewing the opera positively, privately admitted to being disgusted by the music, and Tristan became associated in some quarters with loss of self-control and moral atrophy. …

[Composer Claude] Debussy said that it was ‘hard to imagine the state to which the strongest brain is reduced by listening for four nights to the Ring … It is worse than obsession. It is possession. You no longer belong to yourself.’

We don’t tend to give music this much credit anymore, but there’s a reason why Wagner’s music formed the backdrop to some of the most horrific episodes of European history, and, more recently, one of the more chilling depictions of the Vietnam War, seen above.

The New Gold Standard

by Patrick Appel

Matthew O’Brien spells out why the Euro is doomed:

The euro is the gold standard minus the shiny rocks. Both force countries to give up their ability to fight recessions in return for fixed exchange rates and open capital flows. But giving up the ability to fight recessions just makes it easier for recessions to turn into depressions. And that puts all of the pressure on wages to adjust down when a shock hits — the most painful and destructive way of doing things.

Avent runs with the comparison:

The gold standard was a powerful idea which delivered unquantifiable benefits and unquantifiable costs. The powerful fear of the unknown kept the gold standard intact even as the costs of Depression mounted. But once the dominoes began falling, they fell quickly. Even America, with enormous gold reserves and therefore, seemingly, a strong interest in maintaining the standard, only remained on gold for two more years after the system began to unravel in 1931. The threat that disaster might befall any euro member to drop out may continue to keep economies in line. But America represents a wild card that wasn’t present in 1931: a very large and very rich economy not on the prevailing standard and not suffering for it. The gap between the euro zone and America is the counterfactual, the but-for path, that helps illustrate just how damaging the single currency has been. Leave the euro area and you may not immediately spring back to that alternate path, leaders around the periphery may think, but at least you’ll stop sinking, and you can sell your wares to the world’s healthy economies at a steep discount relative to your neighbours.

Why Take His Name? Ctd

by Zoe Pollock

As I’m getting married in two months (!), I’ve been super into this Dish thread. I’ll be taking my fiance’s name for a variety of reasons. I think Zoe Di Novi’s got a nice ring to it. I always dreamed of getting a new last name when I was a kid, and I’ve got two brothers so the house of Pollock will likely live on. But I’m Jewish and my fiance is Italian American/ Canadian, so it’ll be odd to have a name that doesn’t match my heritage at all (Eastern European/ British).

Italians and Jews have enough in common (friends admit my swarthy, neurotic fiance “could pass”), but I understand readers who worry about the disconnect. I’d like to think that’s an important part of the American experience: With each successive generation we become harder and harder to pin down.

My own mother’s British parents disowned her when she married my Jewish father. Today, the only grief I get for marrying my Italian is of the Jewish guilt variety, insisting we should have the ceremony under some sort of makeshift chuppah. This is progress, no?

(Video: that other classic Jewish/Italian pairing, from Goodfellas)

Proofreading Your Life

by Brendan James

Moynihan braves a glance at his Wikipedia page and confronts some conspicuous errors:

I won’t bore you by cataloguing all the mistakes in my entry (I found about a dozen), but the results weren’t terribly impressive. I’m unsure how long it remained on the page, but according to Wikipedia’s edit log, my biography once claimed that I had a “vagina” and—pardon the language—“love the cock.” The only people who can refute the first point are, I hope, biased in my favor and wouldn’t be trusted by Wikipedia as “reliable sources.” The second point, also difficult to disprove, seems irrelevant to the job of polemicist.

But the damages can go beyond anatomical inaccuracy:

Wikipedia is often the first stop for inquiring minds and so one must vigilantly monitor one’s own entry. Just ask Taner Akçam, a Turkish historian domiciled in the United States, who in 2007 was briefly detained (PDF) by Canadian immigration officers on suspicion of being a terrorist. When he protested that he was an academic, the diligent border agents showed him a printout of his Wikipedia page, which had been defaced by his political enemies. Upon returning to the United States, Akçam was stopped by agents of the Department of Homeland Security who also inquired about his Wiki-reported terrorist connections.

The Stigma Against Cheap Weddings

by Patrick Appel

Millman blames the decline of marriage, especially among the lower classes, on economic factors:

The deep causes of the decline of the marriage norm are the rise of the equality of women and the yawning wage gap between the working classes and the profession and upper-middle classes. Marriage has become aspirational rather than normative because men are less-desireable than they used to be, both because women need them less and because men can offer less than they used to.

There is another, overlooked reason that low-income individuals are less likely to get married these days: they can’t afford to. Weddings are a form of conspicuous consumption. Couples, and their parents, are judged on everything from their attire, to the venue, to the flowers. As Zoe noted recently, the average wedding now costs around $27,000. Committed low-income couples could simply go get married at a courthouse, but settling for a low-cost wedding violates cultural expectations and announces the sorry state of your finances to immediate friends and family. It’s little surprise that many lower-income couples opt for no wedding rather than a dirt-cheap one.

Marriage has many intrinsic benefits, but the increasing cost of a wedding partially explains why, statistically speaking, married couples are better off than non-married couples. Being the type of person who has $27,000 to spare, or has parents who can foot the bill, undoubtedly increases the likelihood of success in all facets of life. If you compared households with $27,000 cars to those without any car, I imagine you’d find that owning a such a car likewise correlates with greater economic potential, physical health, and various other desirable traits.

The Dish Model, Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

Josh Luger at Business Insider interviewed Andrew over the Dish experiment:

BI: How do you wrap your ahead around the meter concept?

AS: Back in the day I would go to Harvard Square bookstore. When I was there in 1984, having left England, there was no way for me to know what was going on back home except in the British papers. I would go there and flip through the newspapers. At some point the dude had every right to say “Either buy the magazine or put it down.” That’s basically what the meter is.

That’s a good analogy but a tad exaggerated for the Dish, since about 80% of our content – the stuff above the read-ons – will always be free for everyone; we’ll never make you put down the Dish. But yeah, if you’ve enjoyed our work over the years for free and haven’t yet chipped in 2 bucks a month, we hope the meter will nudge you into doing so. As one reader puts it:

I have been reading your blog for several years (since it was at the Atlantic). However, I hadn’t subscribed until you offered the $1.99/month model. Why? Hard to say, really. Part of it is that I am a perpetually broke student. But mostly, I think it feels like a lower commitment threshold. Sure, $20 to enjoy a year’s worth of a blog I have enjoyed for six or seven years is not much of a stretch. But the bite-size $2/month just seems more manageable, particularly for the iTunes generation. Even though I’m paying more in the long run (and glad to do it), each small payment is so negligible that it feels like nothing – unlike $20, which feels like handing over a crisp $20 bill out of my dwindling wallet. I wouldn’t be surprised if you get more young readers signing up on the monthly plan. We’re much more accustomed to buying our media in single servings rather than handing over a lump sum up front, as in the dying magazine subscription model.

Anyway, thank you for your writing, Andrew. You have been a role model for me for what it means to grapple with being both gay and Catholic. Keep fighting the good fight!

More feedback from readers on the new pricing option here. Subscribe [tinypass_offer text=”here”] if you haven’t already. And thanks to everyone for their support and feedback, positive and critical. Another reader:

As a cognitive therapist, I’m always interested in people’s belief systems – and the actions they take to maintain them.

Along those lines, I imagine that many of your readers have an underlying belief that says, “Content offered online should be free,” or even, “Paying for content online is wrong. It’s a slippery slope. If we start paying for content, we restrict the flow of information.” Or something along those lines. If they make an exception for you by subscribing, they’ve weakened that belief system. And the mind resists weakening its self-protective beliefs.

In your “pitch,” you might want to invite a discussion about the underlying belief system at work here. Should all online content indeed be free? If so, what else should be free? Coffee at coffee shops? Dinners out? Video games? Therapy sessions? Car repairs? Or just online content? And if so, why?

I myself waited a few weeks to subscribe, just to see how my mind would react to the process. I ended up realizing that I am an enormous consumer of your material and would probably value it at somewhere around $300/year. Compared to that value, a $20 price is a no-brainer.

You might ask your readers: What value (specific, numerical) would you place on one year of content from the Dish? If you value it at more than $20, how does that square with your belief system? At the least, it could be an interesting discussion.

Luger actually asked Andrew a similar question:

BI: How much would you pay for The Dish? How much do you think its worth? I ask because it’s very conceivable that, at some point, you may need to raise subscription prices on existing subscribers to hit your desired revenue goal.

AS: [Laughs] I pay $50 to Talking Points Memo so that will tell you something… I think its worth it. I’d happily pay $50 a year and I can prove that I did. And I asked readers to do so.

I am too falsely modest to say how much I’d pay for The Dish and way too close to even understand the concept. It’s very hard for me to see The Dish as some option for me to read. I, generally speaking, hate everything I write and say its all crap. But, every now and then I go on vacation and I look at it and read it. And I go “that’s not bad, is it?” If I was a general reader and wanted to find out about the world, it’s pretty comprehensive and kind of fun.

Update from a reader:

Reading the discussions about how and why people pay how much for The Dish brings to mind a theory of mine about the value of technology, and how much people are willing to pay for it. I call this John Halbert’s Three Laws of Technology Economics:

First Law: People will pay trivial amounts for convenience, and be conscious of small differences. They will pay $1 for a newspaper, but not $2, for example.

Second Law: People will pay out of cash flow for enhancements to their existing abilities or equipment. They will pay $100 for more memory for their computer, or $50 for a software upgrade. This amount is roughly equivalent to what they carry in their wallet on a daily basis.

Third Law: People will make substantial financial commitments for the ability to do something that they could not otherwise do. In other words, they will go into debt for power. Buying a car, or going into debt for an education, are examples.

This theory is particularly useful when there is a differential between cost and value. For example, a plane ticket is Second Law cost (no one goes into debt to buy a plane ticket), but Third Law value: you can go somewhere faster than you otherwise could. The Internet is a two-law differential: First Law cost ($30/month for Internet access), but Third Law value: you can do many things on the Internet you could not otherwise do.

The Dish straddles the line between First and Second Law cost and value. For some people, $20 is a trivial amount, and they wouldn’t particularly care if it was $20 or $50. For some people, it’s also Second Law value: it’s not just convenience (First Law); it’s an enhancement to their existing abilities or equipment. There is a lot of information/discussion on The Dish that would be difficult to find anywhere else. If I absolutely had to, I’m sure I could find a good discussion of prosecutors vs. public defenders, but I doubt it would be as succinct as your recent discussion. So for some people, reading The Dish is a great timesaver. If you’re a high-powered lawyer who charges $800/hour, saving a couple of minutes a day adds up very quickly.

But for other people, it’s strictly First Law cost and value. Paying $20 all at once may represent the difference between going out on a Friday and staying home. It’s also something many people read occasionally, but that they don’t really need. They can read Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, or any number of newspaper sites. So those people are reading it for convenience, and they are conscious of small differences.

(Photo: A German boy leans against the wall next to a magazine stand to read a comic book, circa 1955. By Evans/Three Lions/Getty Images)

Chart Of The Day

by Doug Allen

Dave Weigel traces the public’s interest in “sequestration” (in blue) and “the sequester” (in red):

[Y]ou’ll see that interest started to rise at the end of February, that the buzziest news stories were about congressional action, and that search volume exploded on March 1 — the Friday the cuts went into effect. By Monday, search volume had fallen by 63 percent. And it’s never recovered, even as the cuts get implemented and local news outlets diligently file stories on their impact.